Tag: nanny state

5 Ways “The New Normal” is Getting Worse and Worse

From mandatory masks to mandatory tests to mandatory track-and-trace, the roll-out is on. It’s been a big few days for the New Normal narrative and, through the deliberately cultivated haze of confusion, it’s not hard to see the world they want to build is taking shape.

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Vaccinate or Terminate – Mandatory Vaccination As Workplace Policy

The discovery, testing and mass deployment of a COVID-19 vaccine are welcome developments in potentially ending the Coronavirus pandemic. A safe and widely available vaccine will also allow employees to return to the physical workplace. The benefits of an inoculated (and presumably safe and healthy) workforce are obvious. Employees immune from COVID-19 will experience fewer absences because they are healthy and so are the people that they care for (or that care for them). Offices and other facilities will avoid pandemic-related closures and disruptions associated with deep cleaning and other infection control measures. Inoculated individuals will be able to travel and participate in service, customer and other people-facing positions without fear of becoming ill or perpetuating an outbreak and making others ill. And while less obvious, incidents of mental health disorders and other very real but debilitating anxiety-related illnesses should wane in the face of actual progress in fighting the pandemic.  If a fully or near fully inoculated workforce could materially reduce and even eliminate the direct threat the pandemic poses to the workplace, it seems natural to implement a mandatory vaccination program as soon as a COVID-19 vaccine is widely available – after health care workers, first responders and others at high risk are vaccinated – to ensure employee health and safety.

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The Science and Law of Refusing to Wear Masks: Texts and Arguments in Support of Civil Disobedience

In fact, the only medical benefit — and even that is only a ‘likely advantage’ — of the use of masks by healthy people in the general public listed by the WHO is the ‘reduced potential exposure risk from infected persons before they develop symptoms.’ It’s important to clarify that this is a risk that I take, not that I represent, of potential exposure to infection from someone else who, presumably, has COVID-19 and breathes, sneezes or coughs on me in sufficiently close proximity for airborne particles or tiny droplets potentially carrying the virus to enter my nose, mouth or eyes. However, if I want to take that risk of potential exposure, that’s up to me, just as I also risk being run down by a car when I cross the road. It’s not the role of the police — and it most certainly isn’t within their legal powers — to compel me to avoid that risk. That’s my right, without which any and every possible or putative risk to my or anyone else’s safety can be used to justify controlling every aspect of my life.

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